Land Matters

I turned right at the steel silhouette of an angel and drove down the crooked road that led to the crash site. As someone who was sitting right between the two probable Washington, D.C., targets—the Capitol and the White House—on September 11, 2001, I’d long wanted to make this pilgrimage. In this place, a handful of passengers had brought down United Flight 93 instead of letting it nosedive into my backyard.

But after driving through the lush farming landscape of southern Pennsylvania, the crash site was something of a letdown. It’s a former strip mine, bare and featureless, and the point of impact itself has been backfilled so that there is literally nothing to see—and anyway, it’s off-limits to visitors. I was confined at the side of the road in a temporary memorial area set up by the local people, where a metal shed holds a guestbook, scrapbooks of photos, and news clips.

I’m not sure what I expected, but I would have been content with a trail around the crash site where I could have hiked and pondered the meaning of it all. The temporary memorial—hemmed in by a metal guardrail and abuzz with visitors—was the exact opposite of that. Still, I’ll wager that most Americans who make pilgrimages here don’t need to ponder its meaning. They know. There was an attack on the nation, and there could be only one proper response: solidarity with the passengers who took the war back to the terrorists. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had targeted urban centers. This one had a different resonance: It struck the heartland. And these visitors’ responses—though any self-respecting designer would decry them as tacky—came straight from the heart. On the chain-link fence visitors had hung caps with patriotic slogans, license plates, fire department insignia. On the guardrail they’d scrawled out their patriotism and prayers in black marker.

Then a middle-aged blonde woman positioned herself in front of a semicircle of crude benches and began to speak. She was Sally, one of the “ambassadors” who greet visitors at the site. I sat on one of the benches to listen.

Sally lived just on the other side of the trees, she said. She had felt the impact of the Boeing 757 and smelled the jet fuel when it crashed. She talked about the people who witnessed the crash, such as the men working outdoors who barely had time to duck when the 757 came in low, turned upside down, and plowed into the earth at 500 miles an hour. She showed us a scrapbook of photos of the 40 passengers and crew. “They were the heroes. They all made a difference that day,” she said.

The ambassadors, all 45 of them, were local people, volunteers. “We’re the caretakers of this place,” she said. “We do this for the families of Flight 93. I believe you’d do the same.”

Listening to Sally, it began to dawn on me that the temporary memorial wasn’t meant for self-styled philosophers to be alone with their thoughts. It’s an in-your-face celebration of patriotism and sacrifice. All that matters here is that, in a time of great crisis, the country pulled together. When Sally stopped talking, I had to wipe my eyes.

I’ve never been moved to tears at a memorial before. I wonder: When this scrappy memorial is replaced by the sleek and serene design conceived by professional designers, will visitors still be as moved as I was?

I sat a bit longer, then got up and was walking back to the parking lot when I realized I’d forgotten something. I went back to the shed and scrawled in the guestbook: “Bill Thompson, downtown Washington, D.C.—The Target. Thank you.”

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA
Editor / bthompson@asla.org